May Day Rerun Part Two: The Haymarket Affair: The Bomb & the Eight-Hour Workday

Margaret's taking a week off post mouth surgery and wants to celebrate May Day! Here's a throwback to the first episode where Margaret sat down with journalist and podcast host Robert Evans to talk about the anarchists who were hanged in Chicago in the 1860s for fighting for the rights of the working class.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
your weekly podcast that once every now and then is
rerun episode like today, I took a week off so
that someone could cut into my face to remove teeth
at my request, and so I'm running a rerun. But
it's a very special week because it's Mayday week, my

(00:26):
favorite holiday besides the other holidays that I really like,
which I also talk about a lot on this show,
but this one is May Day. Well, not today as
this is released, but this week as it's released, the
international workers holiday that comes from a really cool background,
a little bit tragic. They do call it the Haymarket tragedy.

(00:49):
But if you've listened to the show before, you know
that I'm not afraid of thinking tragedy is cool. That
sounds weird, but this is the first ever episode that
I ever recorded of this show that we're rerunning, and
it's about May Day.

Speaker 3 (01:08):
Here you go.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
Welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. I'm your host,
Margaret Kiljoyan. Each week I take you way back into
history to find people who were cool, who did stuff
that was cool because they were cool, so they did
cool stuff. This is part two of a two part
series about heymarket the bomb that brings us the modern
labor movement. So if you haven't already, you might want
to do yourself a favor and go back and listen
to part one.

Speaker 3 (01:30):
But I'm not the boss of you. Do whatever you want.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
And my guest this week is none other than Robert Evans. Robert, Hey,
what's the what's the best way to describe you?

Speaker 1 (01:40):
Here?

Speaker 3 (01:40):
I am the boss of you? And if you listen
to this one before listening to the first one, I
will wreak a terrible vengeance upon your soul. Hell, And
that's who I am. That's all I am is a force,
a force for revenge of content. It's unclear what I am, Margaret,
but I'm here to talk with you about this story.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
And other people who were forces for revenge in their
own right.

Speaker 3 (02:05):
That's right, that's right, And the fact that revenge can
sometimes lead to people being harmed that you didn't intend
to harm, because once the consequences of actions can be unpredictable, exactly.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
And we also have our producer Sophie here. Sophie, you
want to say Hi?

Speaker 1 (02:23):
Yeah, Robert, who Sophie, Robert, Sophie, Margaret, Hi.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
Hi, Okay, so we're going to get back to it.
Where we last left our heroes. Two hundred folks were
at an anarchist rally in Chicago. Cops had shown up,
someone had thrown a bomb, and I was pretty proud
of that.

Speaker 1 (02:42):
Cliffhanger, Yeah, great first week Cliffhanger.

Speaker 3 (02:47):
Mm hmmmm, all sakes solid. Sylvester Stallone film Cliffhanger. Oh,
good movie. Not enough mountain climbing thrillers these days.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
Their bombs in it.

Speaker 3 (03:02):
I think there might have been. Actually, there's definitely like
terrorists and stuff. My memories of it are fuzzy. I
haven't seen it, so I was like twelve or so,
but probably I think probably.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
So much like the bomb in the movie Cliffhanger, which
I've definitely seen this bombly, Yes, Yeah, his bomb shattered
windows for blocks around and one cop was killed immediately
on the spot. The explosion was so loud that the
mayor heard it from his bed. He had like ridden
home on his horse, and then he got undressed and
went to bed, and then he heard the explosion, and

(03:33):
then they went to the window and he heard gunshots,
so he ran back out. The cops drew revolvers and
they started firing wildly. Six more cops were killed. All
of them were killed by other cops.

Speaker 3 (03:46):
Awesome critical support.

Speaker 2 (03:51):
And so because some of the anarchists were armed, right,
the anarchists at the time were often armed, and some
of them might have even shot back. But like all
the friend evidence of all of the bodies and all
of the scene is like really strongly on the side
that probably all of the cops were killed by all
the other cops who were overreacting, and like one light

(04:11):
post was entirely full of bullet holes that were all
coming from the direction of the cops, so they like
removed it and tried to destroy the evidence immediately.

Speaker 3 (04:20):
That's just all such cop shit.

Speaker 1 (04:22):
I know.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
This is like the it's not the origin of cop shit,
the origin of cop shit. Well, actually you covered very well,
but it ties into some origin.

Speaker 3 (04:31):
The origin. This is pretty early on in the concept
of cop shit being a thing. Yeah, these guys were
really breaking new ground in terms of shooting each other
to death. There's a mutual friend of ours. I think
Molly conjure goes through like the websites that are like
end of Watch for cops and like boy howdy, a
lot of cops die because other cops shoot them when

(04:53):
they're doing like training in rooms and they're not like
practicing proper guns safety to each other. It's like had
an uncommon way for a cop to go out.

Speaker 2 (05:03):
Yeah, oh god. And that's how six of them went out,
or eventually I think seven. One of them died like
two years later from the wounds, well one of them.
So it's called a riot, but it wasn't a riot.
It was either a short and bloody massacre or at best,
it was a short and bloody, pretty much one sided battle.

Speaker 3 (05:21):
There was no rioting at any point, really, yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
Yeah, yeah. It was all over within like five minutes,
and there was no records of civilian casualties because basically
everyone who was shot there was like I'm not saying shit,
and they like dragged their friends' bodies away and like
some of them went to the hospital, but most of
them just went off to go find somewhere else because
they all knew what would happen if they showed up
and said I was at this thing. Okay, So Samuel Fielden,

(05:47):
the speaker, who's already having a rough night, you know,
he's like going last, he's following a blowhard.

Speaker 3 (05:53):
Yeah, boy, this is as a public speaker. This is
definitely a rough, rough, rough gig crowd.

Speaker 2 (06:01):
I know, although, okay, I'll go ahead and spoil that
he actually has the best result of any of these people,
of any of the people who get arrested. But he
gets shot in the knee right away. And then as
far as I can tell, a detective like snuck up
and tried to assassinate the earlier speaker, August Spies, and

(06:22):
then August Spies was saved by his brother Henry, who
like got in the way or whatever and got shot
in the groin for his trouble of saving his brother's life.

Speaker 3 (06:31):
Boy.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
And yeah, so one of the things that's kind of
wild about it is that if the cops, if they'd
waited a few more minutes, the meetium was basically over,
it was raining field and was basically done.

Speaker 3 (06:43):
They were speaker up there like people are done. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:48):
Yeah, And it's kind of weird to try and think
about it. Doesn't do you any good, but to try
and think about how differently the history of Chicago and
the US would have been if the cops had waited
like a few minutes. But the thing is they probably
weren't going to some folks back then and now think
that the cops were going to attack the crowd. Whether
or not they were going to like rolling with truncheons,

(07:08):
or whether or not they were going to just like
open fire is kind of anyone's guess. But the guy
who was in charge, Captain Bonfield, he had been itching
to stamp out the anarchists like once and for all
since earlier that day when he had like a council
of war, and he basically he waited until the mayor
was gone and the crowd was at its weakest and
then attacked. His nickname was Blackjack because he liked beating

(07:29):
people so much with his Blackjack as Billy Club that
it became his name for him. Yeah, he had such
a reputation of beating people that at one point, some
like owners of a gas works were like, hey, could
you stop beating up our employees even when they're on strike.
We actually need them, We need them to.

Speaker 3 (07:46):
Be a breaking too many of their boats.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yeah, so it might have wound up a massacre either way,
whether or not the bomb was thrown, but it's it's
hard to saying. Oh, and then one witness who was
pro cop said that Bonfield during a wild every cops
shooting every which direction, grabbed a second gun off of
a fallen cop and just started dual wielding into the
crowd's So this guy is probably more many cops than

(08:12):
any of the Chago anarchists.

Speaker 3 (08:13):
I'll bet he dropped a couple of them. Guns don't
work great when you use them that way.

Speaker 2 (08:19):
Yeah, okay, And so none of the anarchists who stood
trial had thrown the bomb, but it's not like they
were shy in the advocacy of dynamite.

Speaker 3 (08:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:32):
In the years building up to Haymarket, one anarchist professor
from New York wrote into one of the Chicago Anarchist
papers saying that he carried a bomb around in his
pocket all of the time to dissuade cops from approaching.

Speaker 3 (08:47):
Just always be a potential suicide bomber. That's how you
avoid arrest.

Speaker 2 (08:52):
Yeah, which seems like it would work, but eventually backfire.

Speaker 3 (08:55):
You know, it seems like it would work briefly.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
Yeah. Quote was, you can learn to make tri nitro glycerine,
and if you carry two or three pounds of it
with you, people will respect you much more than if
you carry a pistol my God. In another letter, another
person advocating for the use of dynamite wrote, dynamite of
all the good stuff, this is the stuff. A pound

(09:20):
of this good stuff beats a bushel of ballots all hollow.

Speaker 3 (09:24):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (09:26):
Yeah. And so I bring this up because it's like,
there's a lot of things that I love about the
Chicago anarchists, but I think they were kind of just
wrong about dynamite.

Speaker 3 (09:35):
That's probably a little bit. Look. Will dynamite stop you
from getting mugged? Perhaps? Yeah? Will it stop people from
fucking with you? Perhaps yes? Is the best way to
stop people from getting fucked with you carrying a tool
that indiscriminately would destroy large chunks of a neighborhood if detonated, Perhaps.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
Not right exactly. You just need to on threat modeling
a little better. I feel like that's what they want good.

Speaker 3 (10:02):
At I would say, like it would be a little
bit like I mean, I I do intend to one
day chop a twenty millimeter anti tank gun down to
something that's legally a pistol and concealed carry it in
case I get robbed, yeah, by obviously fighting vehicle on
my way home from the grocery store. But I don't
pretend that's good, like a good idea.

Speaker 2 (10:21):
Right, And I think at some level some of these
people knew that they were like participating in radical rhetoric
because they liked radical rhetoric.

Speaker 3 (10:30):
Yeah, because it's fun, because it's it sounds cool as shit. Yeah,
Like that's definitely a character you want to put in
a novel or like a movie's like the guy who's
just like yeah, I mean you introduced him. He's like
walking home in the early morning, and this like cop
sees him and like notices that he's some sort of
like weirdo radical or or even ideally someone else is
getting like fucked with by the police or by like

(10:51):
some militia chuds or something, and he like walks in
and they're like, well, what are you going to do
about it? Then he opens his jacket and he's just
strapped with dynamite. Like yeah, absolutely, you can totally like
definitely an intriguing character, but right, exectively, maybe not the
best idea.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
And so dynamite had actually been used in labor struggle
before this, but no previous time had it targeted people
at all. A couple of times it was used to
destroy property, including once in the Washington Territory where someone
dynamited the empty house of a guy who was foreclosing
people out of mortgaged homes and evicting tenants from their

(11:28):
rental homes.

Speaker 3 (11:29):
Oh you know, I was just talking with it could
happen here with Jake Hanrahan about the riots in Cyprus
he was at and they're doing a version of this
where they're destroying, like using incendiaries to destroy people's vacation
homes because it's like making the cost of living untenable,
like bombing vacation homes, you know, all right, Yeah, yeah,

(11:50):
I have no I have no issue with that. You'll
notice that I'm not condemning that tactic.

Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yeah, but this is the first time that a bomb
is thrown in a labor struggle that I'm aware of,
at least in the United States. And it so this
causes America's very first red scare, which we have a
long and proud tradition of, and all across the country,
everyone freaks out and it's like these damn anarchists and
their dynamite and something must be done, don't you know,

(12:15):
And conspiracies go wild. The anarchists are going to level
the city it's it's kind of hard to overstate how
unhinged this whole frenzy wasah, And this is actually where
the reputation of anarchists in the US comes from. Basically,
the not picnics, not mutual aid societies, not supporting one
another in labor struggle, just bombs. One hundred percent bombs.

(12:35):
That's all an anarchist is is a walking bomb, which
I guess is kind of like today and like smashing windows.

Speaker 3 (12:42):
In total fairness, some of the anarchists were not We're
not doing anything to dissuade that attitude.

Speaker 2 (12:48):
It's true.

Speaker 3 (12:49):
Well, I am literally a walking bomb. I always have
to get on me in case I need to.

Speaker 2 (12:54):
True it's true. Okay, So, to quote Paul Averich, the historian,
about how the New York Times and other newspapers handled
all of this, the New York Times offered the following prescription.
In the early stages of an acute outbreak of anarchy,

(13:14):
a gatling gun, or if the case be severe, too
is the sovereign remedy. Later on, hemp and judicious doses
has an admirable effect in preventing the spread of the disease.
The Philadelphia Inquirer recommended a mailed hand to each of
the anarchists that America was not shelter for cutthroats and thieves,
while the Louisville Courier Journal insisted that the blatant cattle

(13:36):
should be strung up. The sooner the better. Judge Lynch
is a tremendous expounder of the law. It is no
time for half measures, agreed the Springfield Republican, urging the
authorities to make an example of the ring leaders. There
are no good anarchists except dead anarchists. The Saint Louis
Globe Democrat chimed in Globe is another one of those

(13:56):
things that every newspaper had to be called Globe.

Speaker 3 (13:59):
It was like one of the five were talking about him.
They're talking about like hanging people, right. They're not saying, yes,
get them stoned, right, Okay? Yes?

Speaker 2 (14:06):
Yeah, no, Yeah, I mean that would probably work. If
I was nervous about a bunch of anarchists who were
threatening me, I might just buy them all weed. Yeah,
I feel like they would his story anymore. Not a
bad way to get anarchists on your side.

Speaker 1 (14:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:21):
In Chicago, the cops raided everywhere. They raided like fifty
gathering places. They raided people's homes. They never had any
kind of warrants, They didn't bother. The prosecutor who later
tried the case gave the cops permission by saying, make
the raids first and look up the laws later. In
one house, they confiscated a kid's pillowcases because they were red.

Speaker 3 (14:44):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
Yeah, hundreds of people were arrested and tortured. Many of
them were offered bribes for information, but almost everyone refused
to cooperate.

Speaker 3 (14:54):
Some people to say, live in their heads, rent free
until you talked about all the folks that they tortured. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
For two months, all constitutional rights for everyone in Chicago
were dropped based illegally like now was opened. Papers were
shut down, Union gatherings were dispersed, public gatherings were banned.
It just there was no rule of law in Chicago.

Speaker 3 (15:15):
It does kind of seem like historically an awful lot
of people are willing to end the concept of civil rights.
As soon as someone says there's anarchists.

Speaker 2 (15:24):
About right, which has some deep irony. Right, the anarchists
are like law is bad, and they're like, no, we
think laws really bad, and that's why we're going to
suspend it, to go around and beat you all up
and arrest you. And they arrested basically all the editors
of all the anarchist papers except Albert Parsons, who fucked
off to Wisconsin. And then Lucy Parsons managed to get

(15:46):
arrested four times in the ensuing weeks. And you'll be
shocked to know that they said racist and sexist shit
to her when they arrested her. Cops, I know at
one point.

Speaker 3 (15:57):
Well, this one's kind of bad to take my thin
blue line flag down.

Speaker 2 (16:02):
Well, they broke into her house, tied up her six
year old kid on the floor, and then started spinning
him around while screaming basically, where's your dad. We're going
to hang him.

Speaker 3 (16:11):
Oh my god, Jesus fucking Christ. Wow wow.

Speaker 2 (16:18):
Yeah. In the end, a grand jury indicted ten of
them to stand trial. Ten of the anarchists. One of
them went state's evidence.

Speaker 3 (16:26):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (16:26):
Most of the rest were editors and printers at three
of the newspapers, which was the English language The Alarm,
the German language Arbeter de Tongue, which means worker paper.
Because again, really really literal naming schemes.

Speaker 3 (16:42):
Yeah again, and your pronunciation was perfect as as an
expert of the German language, I think.

Speaker 2 (16:47):
Oh.

Speaker 3 (16:49):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (16:50):
And then the third paper, dare anarchist, which means the anarchist.

Speaker 3 (16:55):
You probably figured that part.

Speaker 2 (16:56):
Out of the remaining people who got indicted, one of
them was a young fire brand, and one of them
was a guy who just took off. He just was like,
I'm gone. They arrested him for like, his name was
Rudolph Schnab and a lot of people say he's the
one who threw the bomb. I actually don't believe this,
and I'll get it more into that later. He was
arrested in the aftermath of all of this, and then

(17:17):
like but he spent like ten hours in the sweat box.
That ended up calling it the police where they put
everyone in the sweatbox, and that's where they tortured them.
He refused to talk. He was released, He completely just
fucked off. He politely went and told his boss that
he wasn't going to come into work for a bit,
and then he just disappeared a gentleman.

Speaker 3 (17:36):
I know.

Speaker 2 (17:37):
He left Chicago. He made his way across the border
into Canada, and then like some indigenous folks and then
later international anarchists smuggled him to Europe and then South America,
where he lived out the rest.

Speaker 3 (17:46):
Of his days in peace, and well that's good.

Speaker 2 (17:49):
Yeah, And he basically everyone was like, oh, this is
the guy who threw the bomb. And I think actually,
in some ways it kind of worked out for people
to have everyone think it was this guy.

Speaker 3 (17:58):
But he's out. Yeah. Yeah, but it.

Speaker 2 (18:00):
Wasn't him, and he just didn't want to stand trial
and he got to live a long and happy life
for having made that decision. So they went to trial
and it was a complete eight of them did and
it was a complete sham. None of the eight defendants
were accused of actually throwing the bomb. It was a
murder trial and none of them were actually I mean,
they were accused of doing it, but they didn't say
you threw the bomb, but they said you're guilty of

(18:21):
murder because you're you, because you're an anarchist. And the
judge who oversaw it was completely committed to conviction rather
than obeying the law. Witnesses for the prosecution were usually
paid by the prosecution. The jury was selected specifically in
order to convict them. And we know all of this
because later the governor of Illinois wrote a pardon for
everyone who was left, and he just it's a seventeen

(18:43):
thousand word pardon that he wrote, being like Jesus Christ,
everything that happened in this trial was wrong and basically
a crime.

Speaker 3 (18:52):
That's like three and a half episodes of Behind the
Bastards for a part.

Speaker 2 (18:55):
Yeah, so it's basically one of the most rigged trials
in American history, which is saying something. I feel like
they really went the extra mile here, and they had
to find a lawyer to defend them, and everyone was like,
I'm not going to fucking defend these people. I will
never work again. But they found this guy who's I
think really cool. He's one of my cool people. He

(19:16):
was not an anarchist, he was a moderate, and his
name was Captain William Black. He'd been born a Southerner
and then he betrayed his family as a teenager to
volunteer for the Union Army.

Speaker 3 (19:25):
So already he's kind of liking this guy. Yeah, I know,
so it's pretty base from the start.

Speaker 2 (19:31):
Yeah, and he was just this like he was like
a rising star corporate lawyer, but he believed in the law.
And they came to him and they were like, look,
no one wants to take our case, and you're a
really good lawyer, and we're not guilty, and it's so obvious,
and he like did some soul searching. He's like, all right,
I'm going to tank my entire career to defend you
for barely any money. And he spent like two years

(19:53):
of his life working on their case and tanked his career.
It didn't recover for decades afterwards.

Speaker 3 (19:59):
Wow, what a fucking hero. Good for him.

Speaker 2 (20:02):
I know, I like this guy. And then Albert Parsons
turned himself in. I think it was like the first
day of trial or something is very early on he
just is like, Okay, I need to show up and
stand in solidarity with these people. But also he thought
he was going to win because it was so obviously
a bullshit case against him, And so I think for
some at the core of his heart, he still actually

(20:23):
believed in the American legal system, which was entirely naive.
After a few months of trial, and they proved the
defense proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that none
of the defendants had made or thrown the bomb in question.
The jury took three hours to return with a guilty verdict.
Seven of them were sentenced to hang. One man, oscar

(20:44):
Neve was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. I think
I think only a tiny handful of people, maybe a
few lawyers and the rare politician like actually believe in law.
The judge and the prosecutor and the jury clearly didn't.
It was just a tool to be used to achieve
their goal. The prosecutor and his final address to the
jury said, they are no more guilty than the thousands

(21:05):
who follow them. Gentlemen of the jury. Convict these men,
make examples of them, hang them, and you save our institutions,
our society.

Speaker 3 (21:14):
Our institutions are valid because we are happy to violate
every tenant of them in order to blame these people
to protect our institutions which are valid. Yeah, exactly. It
really makes you feel for Black as like a guy
who believes in institutions, but like, really, I am curious

(21:36):
to learn more about what was going on in this
dude's soul as this all shook out. It could not
have been an emotionally easy thing to handle.

Speaker 2 (21:44):
It was really hard for him. The Paul Average book
talks about him a lot actually, and talks about how
like hard on it was on him on him and
his wife and like just how society treated him and
all of these things, but how he ended up basically
like friends with these people. Even he was like, I
don't I don't agree with what they want, but I
believe that they are like honest and upstanding people who
are doing what they believe is right.

Speaker 3 (22:06):
And there's a lesson there too for anarchists in the
the value of speaking to moderates and sometimes they wind
up torpedoing their entire life to defend you. You know. Yep,
that's also a nice message to take out.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
Totally Okay. So before the sentencing, they were each the
judge allowed each one to make a speech, and the
speech has lasted for days, mostly because Albert Parsons was there.

Speaker 3 (22:36):
Right, but this guy, Yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (22:42):
Feel bad making fun of this dude who's like he's
gonna die, He's gonna die.

Speaker 3 (22:48):
Yeah. No, I mean, look, no speech at a protest
should last more than five minutes, but I think days
is the right amount of time for this sort of
speech to last. Yes, you can sit with it, you know.

Speaker 2 (23:00):
And if you want to read these speeches, then they
are the Haymarket martyrs are the advertisers who support this
show because they're still alive and with us. And here
are the ads that they are providing to us for
you to hear.

Speaker 3 (23:16):
Are you walking down the street with three to four
pounds of dynamite on your body? Why not? Oh, No,
one eight hundred dynamite today to buy enough dynamite to
protect yourself from anything except for dynamite which you'll be
much more vulnerable to.

Speaker 2 (23:33):
Exactly. Here's the rest of the ads. Okay, we're back,
And if you want to hear the rest of the
speeches besides the ones that advertise on this show, I
recommend that you go. If there's one thing that you
follow up and read about Haymarket. The speeches are really

(23:54):
beautiful pieces. And now I get to introduce to you
all the defendants and it's kind of fun, kind of
interesting people. They're mostly German. Fortunately I can pronounce most
of their names. So August Spies went first. We met
him some already and he was the editor of the
arbiter Zetongue. He was the oldest of five kids. He
was born in central Germany. He was a Sagittarius. He

(24:17):
was a happy childhood. He was raised to be a
forester for the government like his dad until his dad died,
and then he left school and emigrated to the US,
and then he became an upholsterer. He opened his own shop.
He saw someone give a lecture on socialism and he
was like, oh, that actually makes some sense. And then
that eighteen seventy seven strike happened and he was like, oh,
that really makes some sense. And soon enough he found
himself an anarchist and he joined the leirand ver Veren

(24:40):
and kind of ironically for the fight for the eight
hour workday, he works like twelve to sixteen hour days
at his German paper, and.

Speaker 3 (24:49):
That is I mean, that's the thing with anarchists. It's like, no,
we don't want to work an eight hour work day,
but if I'm doing the thing I want to do,
then I will work for like nineteen hours a day
of course. Yeah, I want to be doing exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:02):
And he's this guy and he actually keeps a circle
bomb on his desk in his office, and we don't
know whether or not the circle bomb was actually like
one of those old timey bombs circle and has a
little fuse coming out of it. That was probably the
type of bomb that was thrown at the cops. We
don't know whether or not the bomb in his office
had had any dynamite in it or not, And the
historical record would really like you to know that August

(25:25):
SPIE's was fucking hot.

Speaker 3 (25:28):
That's good. Yeah, you know, I was going to ask,
because I'm incapable of actually caring about people if they
were not hot.

Speaker 2 (25:34):
Right, well, you're in luck.

Speaker 3 (25:36):
Actually, that's why I have created a new hot or
not that is specifically for the victims of war crimes,
so you can tell if you need to feel bad
about a specific war crime by knowing if they were
hot or not.

Speaker 2 (25:47):
That's excellent. I look forward to using this service.

Speaker 3 (25:51):
It's sponsored by Microsoft.

Speaker 2 (25:55):
So August SPIE's was known as a ladies man. He's
one of the only people wasn't already married at the
start of all this thing. And he was, yeah, but
he was also he was sardonic and haughty, but he
also refused to lie. And he basically just like walked
around and he threw around his charisma and charmed.

Speaker 3 (26:10):
Women and men and they did.

Speaker 2 (26:12):
And he once spoke in front of Congress about socialism
and he just like went and he was like, yeah,
we're gonna have a revolution, and he was like.

Speaker 3 (26:19):
You get this guy's number.

Speaker 2 (26:22):
He was like, we're not going to make the revolution.
We're anticipating the revolution. We are His quote was birds
of the coming storm, and it.

Speaker 3 (26:31):
Was oh, oh, oh, I know, I know, and that's good.

Speaker 2 (26:37):
Someone in Congress is like, well, why do you hate
the individual with your socialism or whatever? And he's like,
are you kidding me? It's the capitalists who treat workers
like they're just cogs in the machine. And to quote
from his final address to the court, not to Congress,
but when he's sentenced to death. If you think that
by hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement,
the movement from which the downtroden millions, the million two

(27:00):
oil and live in want and misery, the wage slaves
expect salvation. If that is your opinion, then hang us here.
You will tread upon a spark. But here and there,
and behind us, and in front of you and everywhere,
the flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire.
You cannot put it out.

Speaker 3 (27:17):
Holy shit, that's I know. That's that's hot girl shit. Yeah,
that's some hot girl shit. Yeah. Oh my god, did
he write did he do his own like writing. Is
this all him or does he have like, you know.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
Yeah, he's team. That's kind of his thing, is he's
he's one of the Yeah, the editors of these papers.
They're also like publishing their own shit a ton. Sure,
these people have been giving speeches and like writing propaganda.
That's like there their thing, you know. Which is why
I think that they're both leaders of the movement and
not is because they were actually more the propagandas who
got put on trial in this trial rather than like

(27:51):
necessarily the people who are organizing and like planning actions
and stuff. Okay, so Michael Schwab goes and gives his
speech next. And this guy's not as much of a talker.
He's just a quiet, thoughtful man behind a big dark beard.
He's married, he's a father of two. He's like just
a hard worker for the revolution. He's a reporter and
editor for the Arbaderzetongue, and he ran the itwpa's library.

(28:13):
He was just basically seen as a very gentle He
was thirty two at the time of the bombing. And
he was born in Germany with a peasant mother and
a tradesman father, and he had a happy childhood until
and this feels like a pattern. Maybe it's just the
nineteenth century. His mom died when he was eight and
his dad died when he was twelve.

Speaker 3 (28:32):
Well, yeah, they made you know what, they made it
a decent chunk of time. Yeah, it's true, kid, you're
gonna have to carry yourself across that finish line. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:42):
And so when he's like, I don't know, thirteen or something,
and he apprentices to a bookbinder, and he starts working
thirteen to seventeen hour days.

Speaker 3 (28:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:51):
And then he joins a book binding union, and then
the Social Democrat Party, and then and he decides that
political liberty without economic freedom, as a mocking lie is
like his big thing. He moves to Chicago. He quickly
learns that American capitalism is no better than European which
actually happens to a lot of people. A lot of
the immigrants are like, oh, land of opportunity, and they're like, what, No,

(29:13):
this is just as bad. I feel betrayed, And shortly
enough he becomes an anarchist. In his speech at sentencing,
he said violence is one thing and anarchy another. In
the present state of society, violence is used on all
sides and therefore we advocate the use of violence against violence,
but against violence only as a matter as a necessary

(29:34):
means of defense. Then you get oscar Nebe. He was
another worker at the arbiterszetongue really wasn't a good time
to be in the newspaper business, and he was the
only one who wasn't sentenced to death. He'd been born
in the US to German immigrants, and he worked basically
every kind of job from cook to tinsmith. So then
he was unemployed for a while, and at the time
of his arrest he was a yeast peddler. He I

(29:57):
don't even know what kind of yeast, but he would
go around to a car art in the street, just
like get your.

Speaker 3 (30:01):
Yeast east for sale.

Speaker 4 (30:03):
Yeast for sale, Yeah, like fixit with your dynamite, Robert.

Speaker 2 (30:10):
The main thing that he wanted people to know at
is very short speech was that he wanted to be
hanged too. His quote is for I think it is
more honorable to die suddenly than to be killed by inches.
I have a family and children. If they know their
father is dead, they will bury him. They can go
to the grave and kneel down by the side of it.
But they can't go to the penitentiary and see their

(30:31):
father who was convicted for a crime that he has
had nothing to do with.

Speaker 3 (30:36):
Well, yeah, sada know, hard to argue with the logic though.

Speaker 2 (30:43):
To and then his wife died while he was in
prison and he wasn't allowed to go to a funeral.

Speaker 3 (30:47):
Jeez.

Speaker 2 (30:49):
And then we get Adolph Fisher. Adolph Fisher's not a
common name.

Speaker 3 (30:54):
Any close to being a bad name.

Speaker 2 (30:56):
Yeah. He edited Der Anarchist, which was the more radical
paper than Arbiter's Etongue, and he advocated less for a
mass movement and more for autonomous actions by individuals and collectives.
He was born in Germany. He was a second generation socialist.
He moved to America worked as a typographer, and then
as soon as he moved to Chicago, he joined the

(31:17):
leer Veren, the militia, and when he was arrested he
was armed. He had a presumably legally both a revolver
and a dagger, and then one cop took his revolver out,
pointed at his head. Another cop put the dagger to
his chest, and they only didn't kill him when the
lieutenant intervened because they wanted him to stand trial. Instead,

(31:37):
and in prison, two of his co defendants, who didn't
speak English, entrusted him to translate their autobiographies. And basically
he was this like he just worked constantly and to
give money to the cause, and he was really looking
forward to the revolution. And he gave the shortest speech
of them all, which included, I was tried here in
this room for murder, and I was convicted of anarchy.

(31:58):
I protest against being sentenced to death because I have
not been found guilty of murder. However, if I am
to die on account of being an anarchist, on account
of my love for liberty, fraternity, and equality, I will
not remonstrate. If death is the penalty for our love
of freedom of the human race, then I say openly
I have forfeited my life, but a murderer I am not.

(32:19):
I just really like all these speeches.

Speaker 3 (32:20):
Yeah, okay, these were really really good lines. All right.

Speaker 2 (32:24):
Then we get to lewis Ling. Lewis Ling is a
crowd pleaser. He was the youngest, he was twenty one
when the bomb was thrown, and he had a watertight alibi.
There's no way he could have thrown the bomb. Do
you know why he couldn't have thrown the bomb.

Speaker 3 (32:36):
Was he making more pomps?

Speaker 2 (32:38):
Yeah, he was, he was. He was too busy at
home making bombs.

Speaker 3 (32:45):
Incredible, I know.

Speaker 2 (32:48):
And when the cops came to arrest him, he tried
to go down fighting, and he almost killed one officer
with his bare hands before the other one like knocked
him down.

Speaker 3 (32:57):
Unbelievable, What a chad.

Speaker 2 (33:00):
And then The New York Times, which was completely untrustworthy
of a source at the time, especially back then, says
that while he was on the carriage on the way
to jail, he basically said, it all would have been
worth it if only I had been able to kill
that police officer, which frankly he might have said.

Speaker 3 (33:19):
Yeah, I looked based on the man you've described, I
don't think the police maybe lied about that one.

Speaker 2 (33:25):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (33:26):
And that sounds in line with our boy.

Speaker 2 (33:28):
Yeah, okay. So he had just shown up in the
US ten months earlier, before all this shit happens. He
had been born in Germany, and then he had a
happy childhood until you'll be shocked to know. Well, first
his dad was thrown out of work for a workplace accident,
and then he died shortly thereafter. And he and his
sibling and his mother fought starvation every single day. He

(33:51):
fled Europe to avoid the draft, and then he joined
the Carpenter's Union soon found work as an organizer. People
liked him. He was really scrupulous, honest, and up front,
which was basically universal among all the Chicago anarchists, which
I think fucking rules, because if you're going to be
all about something, just be honest. I mean sometimes you
go lie to avoid certain situations.

Speaker 3 (34:13):
Yeah, but it's like it's like it was a Bob
Dylan that said that to live outside the law, a
man must be honest. I forget where that came from, but.

Speaker 2 (34:21):
Yeah, yeah, that's that's what these people are doing. Okay,
And I know you're you're wondering where lewis Ling lays
in the relative hotness of the various defendants.

Speaker 3 (34:33):
I am literally incapable of caring about this story emotionally
until I learned.

Speaker 2 (34:38):
Okay, Well, if you want to, should google lewis Ling.
It's two g's and ling, And don't use the photo
from Wikipedia as the example. Find one where his hair
is shorter and he doesn't really have a beard.

Speaker 3 (34:50):
He kind of looks like Elijah Wood Yeah, that's true.
He's got a little bit a little bit of a like,
kind of a broader chin, but like a little bit
of that Elijah Wood vibe his teeth zone. You could
like cast Elijah Wood to play this guy and it
would work pretty well.

Speaker 2 (35:04):
I would love to watch that.

Speaker 3 (35:06):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (35:07):
And in case you're wondering whether I wonder whether any
of the Haymarket folks were queer, I want to read
you this description of lewis Ling, written by William Holmes,
another anarchist in their circle. Ling was one of the
handsomest men this writer has ever met. His well shaped head,
crowned with a wealth of curly chestnut hair, his fine
blue eyes, his peach and white complexion, and straight regular
features made him a fit model for a Greek god,

(35:29):
while his athletic form and general activity showed him to
be possessed of an abundance of physical vigor and health.

Speaker 3 (35:36):
Well, that just sounds straight as hell to me, Margaret, Yeah, totally, yeah,
and fortunately it was kind of sound super straight.

Speaker 2 (35:43):
Yeah, describing the straightest situation in the world. And to
be fair, like heterosexuality and homosexuality like didn't exist as
concepts at this point.

Speaker 3 (35:53):
No, and so homosexuality. The word was invented by a
German dude in like the eighteen nineties.

Speaker 2 (36:00):
Yeah, that sounds about right, But I've got my head
canon and that's what matters here. But he was also
he was a sex symbol in the anarchist scene. Like
younger men adopted his haircut and his quote lithe way
of walking around the ballroom at all the anarchists balls
to get called his name was like the highest compliment
you could give someone, and his speech was the fieriest

(36:22):
of the bunch. He delivered it in German, and he
ended it with I'm not gonna do the whole thing
in German. I'm not gonna do any of it in German.
He ended it with I repeat that I am the
enemy of the order of today, and I repeat that
with all my powers, as long as breath remains in me,
I shall combat it. I declare again, frankly and openly,
that I am in favor of using force. I have

(36:44):
told Captain Shack, and I stand by it. If you
cannonade us, we will dynamite you. You laugh, you think
you'll throw no more bombs, But let me assure you
that I die happy on the gallows. So confident am
I in the hot that the hundreds and thousands to
whom I've spoken will remember my words, and when you
shall have hanged us, then mark my words, they will
do the bomb throwing in this hope. I say to you,

(37:07):
I despise you. I despise your order, your laws, your
force propped authority. Hang me for it. He wasn't actually
right about the everyone else doing the bomb throwing part
is kind of for better or worse. I'm not actually
sure one way or the other. But now we get
George Engel, who I have a tattoo of on my arm.

(37:28):
I'm gonna show you the tattoo even though no one
else can see it.

Speaker 1 (37:31):
So you're saying you really really don't like this person.

Speaker 2 (37:34):
Yeah, this is definitely my least favorite person, this stick
figure drawn.

Speaker 3 (37:38):
On my arms, the tattoo I have of Roger Stone.
Yeah no, yeah, exactly, Jesus, that's cute. Okay.

Speaker 2 (37:47):
So George Engel is the oldest of them all, much
like Robert's Roger Stone, and he's about fifty years old,
and he owns a toy shop with his wife, and
he works for a deanarchist and he was He was
born in Germany. You'd be shocked to know this. He
was orphaned young, oh whoa, and he was taken in
by a painter who apprenticed him. He came to the US.

(38:09):
He found the US just as bad as Germany. He
first joined the Socialists, but he grew disillusioned by all
their politicking, the maneuvering, the opportunism, the rigged election, the
compromise of principle. So he joined the anarchists. And he
wasn't a speaker or a writer. He was just this
guy who supported the movement with absolute sincerity. But he
was also one of the most radical in his beliefs
of the whole bunch. Like he'd probably the night before

(38:31):
the Haymarket rally, he'd probably been meeting in a bar
with some other of the more radical people like not
parsons and spies and all those to figure out how
with the like two thousand armed men they had that
if they needed to, they could take the city, Like
which places they would raid to get more guns and shit? Yeah,
and which you know you've just watched everyone get shot
in the middle of the big uprising. He also hated

(38:54):
Schwaben Spis because they weren't radical enough, and he hadn't
been on speaking terms with Spis. I just I kind
of hate the idea that you have to like go
face the death penalty with people you have like really
serious scene drama with.

Speaker 3 (39:06):
I mean, I would hope he would be like at
that point, like, well, Okay, maybe we had disagreements before,
but clearly we're all committed to the same degree now
that we're about to get executed, Like, I can't really
hit them for not being committed enough as we're all
about to die together, you would, right.

Speaker 2 (39:22):
I think I think so. I think he like didn't
like he doesn't like super trust them, but he's like, yeah, okay, like.

Speaker 3 (39:29):
This is yeah, we're all about to die together, so yeah,
probably shouldn't fetch too much.

Speaker 2 (39:34):
Yeah. When they arrested him, they just literally showed up
at his house and disappeared him and his family didn't
know what happened to him for days until his daughter
went to the jail and then heard him like singing
distantly down the cell block. And in his final address
to court, he said, we see from the history of
this country that the first colonists won their liberty only

(39:55):
through force, that through forced slavery was abolished. And just
as the man who agitated against slavery in this country
had to ascend the gallows, so also must we he
who speaks for the working men today must hang. And
then Samuel Fielden, this is the guy who couldn't get
a break, got shot in the knee, spoke last the rally.

(40:16):
He wasn't German, which is a big break from everyone else.

Speaker 3 (40:20):
He was born a parent survived to see him hit
the ripe old age of eleven.

Speaker 2 (40:24):
I think so, actually, yay. He's kind of the kind
of comes out this whole thing the winner, as much
as you can win this particular this is like a
it's like a squid games thing, and he wins. He's
born a poor weaver in England, like he starts working
at the age of eight, so I feel like you
can say you were born a weaver at that point.

(40:44):
And he works into cotton mills that Karl Marx and
George Engel based their whole analysis of how the how
shitty the English working class have it like on the
cotton mills in his town. And he cuts his political
teeth in England, speaking on behalf of the Union in
the States and against slavery. Then he moves to the
US and he takes whatever work he can, and he's
like a Methodist traveling preacher, and he travels the South

(41:06):
and becomes dismayed by the conditions of black folks there.

Speaker 3 (41:11):
He's white.

Speaker 2 (41:12):
He settled in Chicago, and then he started working twelve
to fourteen hour days as a stonecutter. And then he
found himself as a speaker for the anarchists again, the
kind of like the C List one. And he's the
treasurer for the IWPA. And when he speaks in the
courtroom apparently it actually he kind of pulls it off.

Speaker 3 (41:28):
It actually.

Speaker 2 (41:31):
A List speaker. Today it brings the entire courtroom to tears,
and the prosecutor laughs and says, it's a good thing
the jury hadn't been here to hear this speech before
they made their verdict.

Speaker 3 (41:43):
Jesus, what a goblin.

Speaker 2 (41:46):
Yeah, he really is. In his speech, Fielden says, we
feel satisfied that we have not lived in this world
for nothing, that we have done some good for our
fellow man and done what we believe to be in
the interest of humanity and for the furtherance of justice.
If my life is to be taken for advocating the
principles of socialism and anarchy, as I have understood them

(42:07):
and honestly believe them in the interest of humanity. I
say to you that I gladly give it up, and
the price is very small for the result that is gained.
I will now read the entire speech of Albert Parsons. No,
I'm just kidding. Albert Parsons goes up. He's last. He
speaks for eight hours over two days. Any kind Yeah,

(42:31):
he kind of just loses his way and rambles a lot.

Speaker 3 (42:34):
Like vamping a bit.

Speaker 2 (42:35):
Yeah, yeah, And I get the impression that this whole
ordeal actually breaks him harder than it breaks the other folks,
or he breaks in a different way maybe, And he
has very few like Baller lines that are worth repeating.
But near the end he said, I have nothing, not
even now to regret. Well, speaking of regrets, here the

(42:57):
ads that support this show. Okay, So the appeals go
on for over a year. They reach all the way
to the Supreme Court, who decides against the anarchists, and
Lucy Parsons and a bunch of the other people from
the IWPA spend the whole time traveling the country giving
talks about the trial and the defendants, and this is

(43:18):
happening in the middle of all this hysteria, right, Lucy's
arrested like multiple times over the course of this, and
her events are shut down everywhere she goes, but it's
still largely successful. The moment of panic recedes, and then
popular opinion starts to shift back towards the defendants, and
the rest of the labor movement manages to find its
spying again. At the beginning, the labor movement's like, whoa,
we don't know these guys, even though they were all

(43:41):
involved in all levels of the labor movement. And then
eventually the labor movement's like, okay, okay, maybe we know
these guys. And it led to this peak and people
paying attention to what was going on, and people becoming anarchists.
The Arbiter Zetongue. That newspaper goes from four thousand subscribers
to ten thousand as more and more people see the
hypocrisy of the government and adopt socialist and anarchist views,

(44:02):
and there's rallies across the country, in the world, and
then kind of again ironically or fittingly, some of the
most ardent supporters at this time end up being people
who hate their politics, but hate even more so to
see the US legal system be like just made a
mockery of by this trial. And now the prisoners are
all celebrities. They're doomed celebrities. But I want to tell

(44:25):
you about what August Spies gets up to while he's
a celebrity, because he couldn't be fucked to get married before.
But he finally marries once he's in jail. Y. Yeah,
and he marries a woman he had never met who
just started coming to the trial. Awesome, and she's an heiress,

(44:47):
Nina van Zandt is an heiress to a fortune and
is a member of high society. And it is like
crazy scandalous through all the papers and apparently some of
the other defendants are like, don't do this, this might
affect the case or whatever, and he's like, no, I'm
marrying this lady. But he wasn't allowed to attend his
own wedding, so his brother, the one who got shot
in the groin defending him, is a stand in as

(45:10):
a proxy for the wedding, and they basically got married
so that she could keep visiting him in jail and
I actually think these were not conjugal visits. I think
that they like never got to do more than like
once kissed through the bars in a very dramatic and
romantic way. Yeah, I knows. She's kind of interesting. She
gives up like a four hundred thousand dollars inheritance, which

(45:32):
because her her family's pissed off about this, which is
twelve million dollars today Jesus.

Speaker 3 (45:38):
And she wow, So it's definitely not like poverty tourism.
She actually like makes it, oh sacrifice.

Speaker 2 (45:45):
She moves to poverty that she's like, I like this town.

Speaker 3 (45:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:48):
And she she keeps her name.

Speaker 3 (45:50):
Of the chicken the common People song.

Speaker 2 (45:54):
Yeah, exactly, I love that song. It's a really good
bitter song to listen to a song. Yea, so so
cause Nina Speeds keep now. Now, Nina Speeds keeps her
name even after her husband dies, and she even like
gets remarried and then divorced and then goes back to
the name Spies because she's now a committed I presume anarchist,

(46:15):
and she lives in poverty. She ends up an old
lady who collects stray cats and dogs, and she marches
in labor demonstrations and she's still alive today. No, but
that would rule, like.

Speaker 3 (46:25):
If you got to like that would be amazing.

Speaker 2 (46:28):
So the Supreme Court says, no, fuck these guys. So
then they moved to a strategy of trying to get
the governor to give them clemency and commute their sentences
to life in prison. And they get thousands of letters
from support from all walks of life, radicals and moderates,
and there's still probably more Americans who hate them, but
it's like, well, this is something that's totally unfamiliar to
modern society. Society was very polarized by this, and a

(46:51):
lot of the moderates instead to ended up taking radical
positions on one side or another. The son of John
Brown writes them a life and sends them a fruit basket,
and he he says, basically, I support you, and my
father would have supported you, and that had he had
the chance, John Brown would have been a socialist too,
since what he believed in was the quote community plan

(47:14):
of cooperative industry. The fruit basket is a nice touch.

Speaker 3 (47:19):
The fruit basket is a nice touch. I hope that
they were Like there's always that debate about like would
John Brown have been like problematic today because he was
you know, he was also a religious extremist. Yeah, totally,
which is the thing that can go a couple of ways.
But no, I think his kid's probably right. I think
he I think being on the right side of slavery
to that extent at that time means he probably would

(47:40):
have been on the right side of a lot of things.

Speaker 2 (47:42):
Yeah, and you know who would know better than the
kid who's name John Brown Junior, you know, m h
And in the end, only three of the But okay,
so they do all of his work to get clemency,
and only three of them end up actually writing the
governor for clemency because there's a big problem to write
the governor for clemency. Have to say you're sorry.

Speaker 3 (48:02):
Oh they are not sorry, so so Field and then
Schwab are like, sure, whatever, we're sorry. Yeah, hey man,
could you not kill us?

Speaker 2 (48:15):
And then Speez says I'm sorry too. But then Speez
freaks out, has this moment of like everyone gets calls
him a sellout, and he's like, no, no, I take
it back, and he writes the governor's second letter. He's like, no,
I'm just kidding. Not only am I not sorry, but
you should kill only me and leave out, like leave
everyone else.

Speaker 1 (48:33):
Go.

Speaker 3 (48:34):
Wow, that's a man who values values the clout.

Speaker 2 (48:38):
Yeah, you know, original clout chaser August Speed.

Speaker 3 (48:42):
Yeah, it's fun. Okay, and then I mean it's not fun.
But honestly, anything you do in that situation is fine.
I agree. I would never judge anybody for being like, well,
I will say I'm sorry to not get murdered. Yeah. Fine.
At the same time, I also respect heavily anyone who
would be like, fuck that shit, I ain't sorry. Yeah,

(49:03):
like you can hang my ass.

Speaker 2 (49:04):
Parsons ended up actually the most torn because he's the
one who's like really like, you know, he's kind of
broken at this point, but he's a true believer, right,
and he's basically like asking all his friends for advice.
He's like, what do I do? What do I do?
And then one of his friends, this guy named dire Lum,
is like, honey, Albert, what you should do is die.

(49:26):
And Albert's like, oh, thank you. You're the only one
willing to tell me that.

Speaker 3 (49:32):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (49:34):
That is so chances, I know. So he decides to die,
and so he writes an open letter to the governor
and his open letter says, look, if I'm innocent, let
me go, and if I'm guilty, kill me. So the
governor grants clemency at like the final hour to field
in the Schwab and the five who refuse to say

(49:55):
they're sorry where to die. And now I'm going to
tell you who threw the fucking bomb?

Speaker 3 (50:02):
Eh?

Speaker 2 (50:03):
Yeah, good, okay, because the anonymous bomber comes back into
play at this point, we don't know for sure, right,
but historian Paul Average has done more work than anyone
who I actually trust about this, And Albert Parsons was
convinced a cop did it. It was like a Pinkerton did it.
He's like, oh, it's a false.

Speaker 3 (50:21):
Flag attack, right, false flag attacked.

Speaker 2 (50:23):
Yeah, But basically, probably while all this is happening, the
bomber was probably this guy named George Schwab who's completely
unrelated to Michael Schwab, and he fucks off to New
York after the bomb is thrown, and then when they're
sentenced to die and everything, like the Supreme Court thing
fails and all this shit, he's like, a, hey, should
I come forward? Will that save these people's lives? If

(50:45):
I say I'm the one who did it? Will they
be let go? And they all kind of think about it.
And when I say they all not everyone, like the
defendants don't know this except the two autonomous ones who
are more not actually lewis Ling, but the two autonomous
ones who ran dare anarchist. They end up knowing about it.
And they finally they sit down and they're like, no,
if you come forward, you're just going to die too.
It's just one more victim of capitalism if you come forward.

Speaker 3 (51:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:08):
So the bomber is like, all right, and he does
not come forward.

Speaker 3 (51:14):
That's a lot to live with. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:16):
And then lewis Ling not only did he not write
for clemency, he actually had his name taken off the
Supreme Court case because he was he was, I'm done
with capitalist justice. I have nothing to do with any
of this.

Speaker 3 (51:28):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (51:30):
So a week before the execution, guards find bombs in
his cell. He has four bombs, and I always thought
that they were there to like affect a prison break,
but apparently the fuses were like a set a second
or two long, so they were almost certainly there so
he could kill himself. But they find the bombs, so
he doesn't get to kill himself in a nice clean,

(51:50):
explodeing way. And instead, the day before the execution, lewis
Ling has somehow got a hold of a blasting cap.
There's a lot of different claims about how he got
it there. He puts it in his mouth and he
blows himself up, takes his own life. But because it's
only a blasting cap, it takes six hours.

Speaker 3 (52:09):
For him to bleed to death.

Speaker 2 (52:11):
Oh Jesus, And since this is his exit from history,
I'll say that a few days before he died, his
mother and aunt had written him letters, and his mother wrote,
I will be as proud of you after your death
as I have been during your life, and his aunt wrote,
whatever happens, even the worst, show no weakness before those wretches.

Speaker 3 (52:32):
So he had supportive family. That's good. The one person
whose family wasn't dead.

Speaker 2 (52:38):
I know exactly. And then the night before the execution,
all the condemned men they're sitting around, they're smoking cigars,
and they're talking with jailers. Its apparently somehow very friendly.
Parsons keeps like singing and reciting poetry every chance he gets.
I'm pretty sure Parsons has lost his mind, which I
do not blame him at all. I'm cert sure entirely

(53:00):
my mind in this in this environment.

Speaker 3 (53:02):
I've lost my mind on like five hour long flights before. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (53:05):
Yeah, George Engel my favorite. He talks with the priest
who comes to offer him his last rites. And I'm
going to say quote what he said to the priest
in the shadow of the gallows. As I stand, I
have done nothing wrong. I have not done everything right
during my life, but I have endeavored to live so
that I need not fear to die. Monopoly has crushed competition,

(53:26):
and the poor man has no show. But the revolution
will surely come and the working man will get his rights.
Socialism and Christianity can walk hand in hand together as brothers,
for both are laboring in the interests of the amelioration
of mankind. I have no religion but to wrong no
man and to do good to everybody. And I just
it's a cool guy. Yeah, he's being nice to the

(53:49):
priest that he didn't even call for He like, as
the priest is leaving, he's like, look, hey, I know
that was weird, but I didn't even call for you. Okay.
The execution. On the morning of the execut there's three
hundred cops and they're guarding the prison like it's a fortress,
and there's once again gatling guns laying in wait, and
for once, the media is right. The media is on

(54:10):
about how an army of anarchists is going to descend
on the place and free them all. But actually the
anarchists had come up with a plan like that, and
actually it was the condemned men who are like, guys,
it's over, it's fine, let us just get this over with.
And so that's why there's no massive last minute jail break.
Lucy Parsons shows up to see her husband. She has

(54:32):
her two kids in tow, and an officer tries to
stop her. She says, you're gonna have to fucking kill me,
and then she just like pushes her way through the
police line. However, they then arrest her, strip her naked,
leave her in a cell with her kids until after
her her husband was hanged Jesus with a noose around
their neck. Each man shouts their last words. Spies says,

(54:56):
there will come a time when our silence will be
more powerful than the voices you strangled.

Speaker 3 (55:00):
Today.

Speaker 2 (55:02):
Angle shouts in German uh Hoch, the anarchy or Hurrah
for anarchy. Fisher shouts, also in German, hurrah for anarchy.
This is the happiest day of my life. And then
Parsons he says, I feel bad making fun of him
right now, but I'm just gonna do it. I'll just
quote him. We'll make fun of himself. I'm sorry, Parsons,

(55:22):
you were a great guy. Parsons says, will I be
allowed to speak? Oh, men of America, let me speak,
Sheriff Mattson, Let the voice of the people be heard.

Speaker 1 (55:30):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (55:31):
And then the trap opens, and the hanging was done wrong,
and they took long life. They took minutes to strangle.
I think it took seven minutes for the last one
to die.

Speaker 3 (55:41):
Sure that was an accident, Yeah, I'm.

Speaker 2 (55:43):
Sure, you know classic whoops. I've been doing this my
whole life, and I just somehow slept up and didn't
break their necks. Their funeral march had twenty thousand participants
and two hundred thousand onlookers. And again, I actually should
have looked up the population Chicago at the time, But
two hundred and twenty thousand people in eighteen eighty seven.
It's a lot of people, a lot. Yeah, it's the

(56:06):
largest funeral that had ever been seen in Chicago. And basically,
unions and radicals across the world commemorate their deaths and
still do on May first, and which is the Worker's holiday,
Like I said at the top, in every country of
the world except the US, where they can't handle the
radical stuff.

Speaker 3 (56:24):
Yep. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (56:26):
But to close out the rest of our characters, you
want to know what happened to Captain Blackjack Bonfield, right,
the cop who charged the crowd. Well, yes, he was
caught taking bribes, and among the stolen goods he was
storing was the personal effects of lewis Ling. Everyone had
been like, hey, where's lewis Ling's stuff, and the cops like, oh,

(56:46):
I don't know. And it's because this dude has stolen it.
He gets fired, which is actually that might be a
sign of the times having changed in a bad way.
He actually gets fired for this.

Speaker 1 (56:56):
And.

Speaker 2 (56:58):
That's actually the impetus to get start getting the pardon
pushed forward. Is they're like, look, the main guy for
the prosecution was a piece of shit, corrupt cop, and
they get pardoned. A progressive as elected governor of Illinois
in eighteen ninety three, and he once again he tanks
his entire career. It costs him the reelection, but he

(57:20):
pardons the remaining He frees the remaining three who are
still in prison, and he posthumously pardons the five who died.
And he never managed to get back into office after
doing that. But well, he actually cared about justice.

Speaker 3 (57:38):
Good for him. Yeah, another moderate who made a sacrifice. Yeah,
for these people. That is nice to see a couple
of times, in addition to all of the ones who
stopped by and did nothing. But yeah, yeah, Okay.

Speaker 2 (57:51):
Then there's the fun of the cop statue. In eighteen
eighty nine, the police put up a statue in Haymarket
Square in honor of the fallen officer, the only one
who had actually.

Speaker 3 (58:00):
They oh, the one who didn't get killed by other cops. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (58:05):
For some reason, they didn't do one of all the
people who had been murdered by officers. It wasn't a
picture of dual wielding blackjack shooting down other cops.

Speaker 3 (58:16):
A monument to the cops killed by other cops.

Speaker 2 (58:20):
It's called critical support the monument. Yeah, all right, so
the model for this cop, they don't use the actual
dead cop as the model. They take a living cop
a guy named Birmingham, and he's crooked as shit.

Speaker 3 (58:35):
Was the dead cop ugly? Were they just like that
guy's not sexy enough for a statue.

Speaker 2 (58:39):
Yeah, I gotta assume. So they pick a crooked cop
who then gets fired for fencing stolen goods.

Speaker 3 (58:48):
Incredible, Yeah, an amazing monument.

Speaker 2 (58:50):
And then in nineteen oh three someone steals the crest
of the city off the statue. In nineteen twenty five,
a street car driver, probably on purpose, jumps the track
with the street car and plows down the statue. It
gets moved to a place called Union Park. On May fourth,
nineteen sixty eight, it was defaced with black paint. The

(59:12):
next year, the Weathermen, who are the radical fact part
of a radical faction of the anti war movement, they
just fucking blow up the statue.

Speaker 3 (59:19):
Ah, nice to hear they got one of those bombs, right, Well,
they get two of them, right because then yeah, they
got a couple, right, Well, they get at least to them, right,
because they rebuilt the statue.

Speaker 2 (59:28):
And then a year later the weathermen blow.

Speaker 3 (59:30):
It up again.

Speaker 2 (59:31):
Excellent, And then it was rebuilt once more, and now
it's in the lobby of the Chicago Police headquarters. Where
every day every cop can see a statue of a
crooked cop. And this didn't win not the cop statue,
but hey market, it didn't win them the work eight
hour workday. But as far as I can tell, it
didn't actually delay it as much as sometimes people say.

(59:54):
The labor movement in the US and especially worldwide actually
grew and eventually with this and basically, one by one,
various trades and unions one better hours. By nineteen thirty seven,
the Fair Labor Standards Act finally won it for more
or less everyone nationwide.

Speaker 3 (01:00:11):
That's good.

Speaker 2 (01:00:12):
Anarchism in Chicago kind of faded after the trial, but
anarchism worldwide grew, and basically everywhere you would go across
the world, in any kind of labor hall, you would
see the Haymarket martyrs, you see pictures of them. It
leaves me with this like really complicated takeaway, right, because
their rhetoric of violence is kind of what got them
into this mess on some level.

Speaker 3 (01:00:32):
Yes, and certainly all of the dynamite had an impact
on all of the dynamite.

Speaker 2 (01:00:37):
Right, But it's really hard to say whether the end
result was positive or negative for the labor movement. For anarchism,
for any of these things. It's like it's it's almost
impossible to parse out. And then and one of the
things that I'm left thinking about with this is that,
like a lot of the stories of Haymarket that you'll
read and in sort of more mainstream papers will be like, oh,
there was this good protest movement and some anarchists came

(01:00:58):
and fucked it all up by throwing a and that
leaves out the fact that it was the anarchists who
organized not the whole thing, but a huge chunk of
it in the first place, and certainly the thing that
got fucked up by someone throwing a bomb. And I
feel like that happens a lot, is that people like
radical people end up organizing this, and then that that
work is forgotten about. And then my final note is

(01:01:22):
that Lucy Parsons, who I opened the story up with,
she stayed involved her entire life, and she ended up
helping form the union the Industrial Workers of the World
in nineteen oh five, who probably wanted to get their
own episode, and she used the lessons of Haymarket to
teach young radicals. In the nineteen twenties, the Chicago Police
Department declared that she was quote more dangerous than a
thousand rioters, and that feels like something to aspire to.

Speaker 3 (01:01:46):
Yeah, yep.

Speaker 2 (01:01:49):
So Robert, how are you feeling about Haymarket.

Speaker 3 (01:01:54):
I mean bad, it doesn't I mean on the whole
bad time. I feel good that a lot of people
came around to the fact that it was bullshit when
in terms of talking about like the long term value
of something like this, it's not bad that the kind
of inherent contradictions and factileness of the system and how

(01:02:15):
it exists primarily not to achieved justice but to do
violence against people who threaten power like that, that's not bad. Like,
it's useful that that was done. I don't know how
much comfort that was for the families of the deceased,
but it seems like it was some comfort for most
of the deceased. And May Day is a good holiday.

Speaker 2 (01:02:39):
It is a good holiday.

Speaker 1 (01:02:42):
Dare I say cool people who did cool stuff?

Speaker 3 (01:02:47):
I hope. So, yeah, it's pretty pretty cool, you know.
I went to my favorite May Day that I've been
to was in Berlin. And in Berlin, one of the
things they do on May Days is all of the
bars kind of like move out into the streets, like
they'll just set up like kiosks and stuff with their beer,
and for one night it's allowed to just like throw

(01:03:09):
your bottles everywhere. So there's just like snow drifts of
shattered glass all over the streets and it's fine. Apparently
this one night you can break glass all you want
all over the damn place. And I had this very
fun moment of just like shattering god knows how many
Ibria bottles over the street. And then at one of
the s Bahn stations, my friend like stopped to piss
in like a corner, and will you get immediately ticketed

(01:03:31):
by the jury place?

Speaker 2 (01:03:35):
That's just taking it too far.

Speaker 3 (01:03:37):
There's kids hucking bottles at the streets. Size yeah, just
like all right, but this isn't okay.

Speaker 2 (01:03:42):
Yeah, we have laws here, we have rules here.

Speaker 3 (01:03:46):
Yeah, we have one less rule tonight, but we have
rules here.

Speaker 1 (01:03:50):
Yea.

Speaker 3 (01:03:53):
Anyway, thank you, Margaret, this has been a hoot. Yeah,
thanks for coming on. And dare I say a holler? Yeah?
Oh that's too much.

Speaker 1 (01:04:02):
Do you have anything you want to plug? Robert Evans?

Speaker 2 (01:04:05):
Never never heard of you, Robert Evans.

Speaker 1 (01:04:06):
Do you have anything?

Speaker 3 (01:04:07):
I've certainly never heard of.

Speaker 1 (01:04:08):
Me, David, do you host any podcasts.

Speaker 3 (01:04:12):
I do the Dynamite Cast where we talk about the
health benefits of a dynamite enriched diet, which are none.
There are Well, actually, it would probably help with certain
heart conditions, right, because nitroglycerin is literally used in one
form as a heart medication. So I guess there are
some ways that ingesting dynamite might potentially help you. But

(01:04:33):
I doubt it would. I doubt it would work if
you just were to take the form used as an
explosive as.

Speaker 4 (01:04:39):
A heart medication. But I don't actually know you're using
it wrong. I don't know, Like, Okay, have you ever
had a headache? Okay, now if you don't want to
have a headache, you could explode your entire body.

Speaker 3 (01:04:52):
Well, now that's you. See this is you're really getting
onto the subject of my new self help book, The
Explosion Driven Life.

Speaker 1 (01:05:00):
So so from what I got from what Robert just said,
he was saying, listen to it could happen here. Uh
And and buy his book After the Revolution.

Speaker 3 (01:05:10):
And check out my new book, The four Dynamite Workweek
and The four Dynamite Body both go great together and
will teach you how to change your life with just
four sticks of dynamite amazing Margaret.

Speaker 1 (01:05:21):
Where can people follow you?

Speaker 2 (01:05:23):
People can follow me on the internet on Twitter at
Magpie Killjoy and on Instagram at Margaret Kiljoy.

Speaker 3 (01:05:29):
Who what we do do Well?

Speaker 1 (01:05:32):
We'll be back next week on Monday with another allegedly
with another cool person who may have done in fact
something cool, right Margaret.

Speaker 2 (01:05:41):
With lots of caveats as always, Yep, Cool people Coming up?

Speaker 1 (01:05:51):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com. Check us out on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.